Dipankar Gupta has an article in the India Today special issue called ‘Transforming India’ (dated 06th Oct). Some of the numbers from his piece do make for interesting reading:

• India spends around 45 billion USD on Research and Development (he doesn’t specify what exactly counts as R&D, but those line items should be available somewhere)
• From 1990 till 1998, the spend on R&D and Technology Training came down from INR 219 crore to INR 156 crore (note: 10 million make a crore)
• The global rank of some of the institutes are as follows: IITs (50th), IIMs (84th) and JNU (192nd)

He goes on to add that India doesn’t cut a dashing figure in the Scopus Index as well.

There would be more such numbers available to show that

• the country isn’t doing enough by means of policy and implementation to encourage basic science and technology
• the country isn’t getting its act together to ensure primary education is being delivered correctly

State run/sponsored/funded schools still take in a large segment of the student population. And, various schemes notwithstanding, the schools have a systemic problem in terms of delivery of content and availability of teachers.